The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (40 page)

T
om Gamble wasn’t quite as used to getting woken up in the middle of the night as White, but when the summons came, he got into his car, made his way down the access road, and joined White on the transformer deck, a concrete platform that formed a kind of balcony over the swirling surface of the river. In the glow of the dam’s arc lights, the two men could see the currents swirling in confusion beneath their feet—twisted eddies and strange boils created by disoriented water that had just passed through the turbines in the base of the power plant. Then they walked back into the generator hall, through the machine shop, and out along the base of the east abutment until they were
standing next to the flip bucket, where the jet of high-speed water was arcing into the shank of the arriving dawn.

Of all the places where one could stand at the dam, this was perhaps the most dramatic. Two sounds predominated: the thunder of the jet as it exited the portal of the spillway, and the hiss of the plume soaring almost half the length of a football field into the river. The combined roar was loud enough that the two men had to shout to be heard, so they mostly stood in silence gazing into the gray, early-morning light. They waited patiently for about ten minutes as the darkness muted and the arc of water slowly materialized. Then it happened: something dark appeared to fly over the flip bucket and catapult out toward the river.

The object seemed to be about the size of the chair at the desk in the Control Room, but it was difficult to be certain because the projectile was propelled with such extreme force and speed. Even though it must have weighed hundreds of pounds, it shot into the air and then, like a flash, was gone, vanishing so swiftly that neither White nor Gamble was sure of what he had actually seen. The two men turned to each other with a look that said,
“Did you see that?!”

The canyon was still half dark and the light was tricky. Perhaps they had imagined it. They turned back to the plume of water and resumed their vigil.

By now, the sun was just topping the rim and light was finally starting to pour into the canyon. As the first beams illuminated the spillway arc, White and Gamble registered a visual shock in the same instant. The plume was not a uniform blast, but a series of spitting coughs. Every few moments, the sweep would waver slightly. Then a cough would come as a load of debris spewed forth—half-digested gobbets of gravel, along with shards of concrete and thin, twisted objects that appeared to be pieces of rebar. But what disturbed them most wasn’t the material that was being vomited from the portal of the spillway; it was the color of the water.

When the sun hit the stream directly, they could see the plume was neither white nor green, but a pastel shade of pink—a hue halfway between orange and maroon that both men realized with a chill perfectly matched the color of the Navajo sandstone that formed the walls of the canyon cliffs.

The conclusion was inescapable. Somewhere deep in the east spillway, the water had excavated an entire section of the tunnel’s steel-reinforced concrete lining, exposing the porous sandstone walls to the full fury of the river.

Good God
, thought White.
It’s into the bedrock.

While White pondered the implications, Gamble headed for his office. He needed to get on the phone to Denver and call in the cavalry.

I.
In August 2009 when a single turbine spun out of control at Russia’s Sayano-Shushenskaya Dam on the Yenisei River, a generator was torn from its bearings and hurled through the wall of the plant, flooding the generator room, triggering an underwater explosion that shut down the power plant and released forty tons of oil downstream while causing a blackout over the entire region. Seventy-five people were killed.

No matter how full the river, it still wants to grow.

—A
FRICAN PROVERB

T
HE
Denver Federal Center is a heavily guarded, one-square-mile enclosure that hosts the largest concentration of federal agencies anywhere in the country outside of Washington, DC. Here, in the shadow of the Colorado Rockies just west of Denver, twenty-six branches of the government ranging from the Fish and Wildlife Service to the FBI are spread across a miniature city gridded with streets and parking lots that are patrolled each night by foxes, deer, and coyotes. The biggest structure within this enclosure, by far, is a fourteen-story glass-and-concrete monolith known as Building 67, which serves as the headquarters of the
Bureau of Reclamation’s Engineering and Research Center. Whenever something goes wrong at one of the bureau’s 467 dams, which are spread across seventeen western states, and somebody decides it’s time to dial 911, this is where the call arrives.

When Gamble got through to the E&R Center on Monday morning, he kept calm and restricted himself to the facts. He offered no dramatic pronouncements about the spillway tunnels collapsing, nor did he indulge in any feverish speculation about the possibility of a tsunami tearing through the Grand Canyon toward Lake Mead and southern Arizona. His tone was measured and the gist of his message was simple. Something has gone wrong inside our spillway
and we need for you to get a few experts out here to have a look. And if possible, we would really like you guys to try to make that happen
right now.

That last part caught their attention. When the captain of a flagship dam such as Glen Canyon said that he needed something to happen fast, Reclamation was capable of switching from a ponderous bureaucracy whose pacing mirrored that of the IRS to an operation of military efficiency and dispatch. The expertise of the scientists, technicians, and bureaucrats in Building 67 and a handful of satellite offices just a few steps away encompassed everything from mechanical engineering and electrical design to power transmission and geo-synthetic corrosion monitoring. When a dam was in trouble, every one of those people shelved their priorities and brought everything they had to bear on the matter at hand.

Gamble’s call was swiftly passed to Bruce Moyes, who headed up a division that specialized in the structural analysis of concrete, and would spearhead the crisis team. A bearded engineer with a gruff sense of humor, Moyes had a range of responsibilities, among which was a long-term assignment to track the performance of Glen’s concrete as it aged. Thus he was intimately familiar with the dam and tended to speak of the structure as if it were alive, a cantankerous creature whose temper and moods—not unlike Moyes’s own—shifted and changed with time, temperature, and a host of other variables. The two things Moyes cared about most deeply were evident every time the phone in his office rang and
he barked into the receiver, “Concrete dams!”

Moyes had direct access to all of Glen’s blueprints and schematics, and the team that he could assemble within Building 67 was capable of tackling virtually any challenge arising from a problem with the valves, gates, penstocks, turbines, generators, pumps, or any other mechanical component of the dam. Those experts, however, did not necessarily have a handle on the hydraulic forces at work inside Glen’s spillway tunnels. For that, Moyes needed to talk to the folks across the street at the Hydraulics Lab.

Building 56 was a squat, two-story redbrick structure where the Remington Arms Company had manufactured ammunition during World War II, and the lab it housed was enormous—sixty-five thousand square feet, almost half a city block, with thirty-foot ceilings and a floor so vast that the staff kept a little fleet of bicycles next to the door, two for the engineers and three for the shop technicians. Along the floor, a network of trenches and pipes could funnel up to a quarter of a million gallons of water to the scale models that were used for testing and research. The man in charge of the lab, Phil Burgi, had spent two years working as a civil engineer and teaching math with the Peace Corps in Chile before joining the bureau in 1969. His specialty was hydraulics, and his
point man for this emergency was Dr. Henry Falvey, a gifted scientist who had completed his doctorate on hydrodynamics in Germany.

When Moyes summoned Burgi and Falvey,
the three men conducted a quick huddle to grapple with the most immediate question, which was to figure out which of them lived closest to the Jefferson County airport. Falvey’s house was up in the mountains, and Moyes lived in the opposite direction, but Burgi’s place in Wheat Ridge was less than ten miles from Jefferson. Moyes ordered him to drive by his house to grab his steel-toed boots, then make a beeline for the airport and get himself down to the dam so he could start feeding information back to the lab.

Burgi left immediately. When he got to the airport, an Aero Commander 500 was on the tarmac and the pilot was waiting. They were in the air in less than two minutes.

D
enver sits on the east side of the Rockies, and all of the rivers that flow off the Front Range—the Platte, the Arkansas, the Republican—drain east toward the Mississippi. But within the first twenty-five minutes of the six-hundred-mile flight, the little Aero Commander had vaulted over the Continental Divide and was charting a path that roughly paralleled the upper Colorado River. This offered Burgi a bird’s-eye view of the mountain snow cover and a portion of the runoff that had placed Gamble and his team in such a fix.

Far below, on the Gunnison, he could see that the Blue Mesa Dam was spilling spectacularly, and so too were Morrow Point and Crystal, a pair of sister dams that lay just downstream. A few minutes later, they were directly over the waters of the San Miguel and its main fork, the Dolores. Both rivers were swollen with snowmelt. And just off his left shoulder lay the San Juan, which was freighting its own heavy load of runoff from the Animas, the La Plata, and the Mancos. Every drop of water in each of those rivers was heading directly for Lake Powell.

Burgi was not a pilot but he shared some of a pilot’s passion for flying. He had always taken pleasure in staring out the window of an airplane and observing the landscape unfurl beneath him, and he studied the terrain closely as they passed over the Colorado border, swung into the southeastern corner of Utah, and entered the crystalline airspace above John Wesley Powell’s Plateau Province. By now they were approaching the “sky islands,” the isolated pockets of desert mountains that dot the canyon country, and he was able to pick out the Abajos, the La Sal, and the Henrys. Along the empty and dessiccated stretches between their snowcapped summits, he watched as the land turned dry and sunbaked and deeply incised. Then he spotted something strange.

What caught his eye was a patch of blue so intense, so impossibly vibrant—especially when cast against the toasted browns and the charred oranges of the canyons—that it almost looked fake. But what struck him with even greater force than the way the color clashed with the surrounding terrain was the overwhelming size of this thing. It seemed to go on forever, extending far beyond the field of vision afforded by the windows of the plane. He’d never seen a reservoir so flagrantly immense.

Reservoirs come in almost every configuration imaginable. Some are thick and others are thin, but most have a kind of cardinal integrity to their shape. Lake Powell wasn’t like any other reservoir that Burgi had ever known. Perhaps the best analogy—an image that captures with uncanny accuracy the appearance of the reservoir as seen from the air—was a comparison invoked by the writer John McPhee, who once likened it to the human lymphatic system. The reservoir wasn’t so much a body of water as a tessellated mosaic of squiggly lobes and nodules connected by long, thin tentacles.

As Burgi flew over this azure labyrinth, he marveled at both the reservoir’s surreal shape and weird beauty, and at how much water must be stored within that huge and intricate lattice of sandstone. Then, tucked at the far southern end, something else caught his eye.

Standing out defiantly against the blues and the browns was a thin and curving white line. This, Burgi knew, was the top of the Glen Canyon Dam, and from his vantage, it appeared exquisitely slender and delicate—a feature whose scale, in the surrounding landscape, was no less tiny than the leading edge of a baby’s fingernail. He was struck too by the starkness of the division created by that alabaster curve. On one side loomed the immense and deceptively placid man-made sea. On the other side lay a great canyon whose dark declivity cut across the plateau in a series of loops and bends that faded into the purple distance far to the south and west.